‘Ignominious Anomaly’ : Ex-Councilman Mitchell Uses Mind Over Matter to Shed Pounds and Launch a New Career

Former San Diego City Councilman Bill Mitchell was channeling one day this spring, tapping into his Higher Self to ask why he had gained so much weight, making him tip the scales at 222 pounds.

An inner voice answered.

“It said, ‘Just take a look at your ignominious anomaly,’ ” Mitchell said over breakfast recently.

“I said, ‘What?’ I didn’t know the word, yet it came to me when I was talking to my Higher Mind. My Higher Mind knew it, and so I looked it up and it (ignominious) means ‘a false dishonor, a false disgrace.’ ”

Voila! The realization--that lurking in his mind was a secret sense of personal humiliation--enabled Mitchell to change his thinking, forgive himself and shed 17 pounds practically overnight.

So began the latest turn in the metaphysical odyssey of Bill Mitchell, the former two-term city councilman who represented La Jolla, Rancho Bernardo and other northern San Diego neighborhoods.

Turned out of office in 1985, when he was defeated by political neophyte Abbe Wolfsheimer, and then soundly trounced in his 1986 bid to unseat Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego), the 54-year-old Mitchell had retreated into the relative obscurity of private life to sell real estate and ponder his next calling.

Now he’s found it: Motivational speaking. And the one-time politician is anxious to join the ranks of the locally inspired Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker and Zig Ziggler, who gives inspirational messages on a nationally syndicated radio program, by putting on seminars and preaching to people that the secret to full lives and even fuller wallets is in the enlightened self.

“This is what I talk about in my course, that if you program your living computer, which is your subconscious mind, so that you have nothing but positives in there, it is impossible for anything to happen to you but positive,” Mitchell said. “So anything that happens to you that’s negative in your life is because it was programmed in your mind.”

So far, Mitchell has put on only one paid seminar--actually a three-hour continuing education course held Sept. 17 and sponsored by National University, where Mitchell’s 23-year-old son is a counselor. The course was entitled “Moving to Success . . . An Evening With Bill Mitchell.”

The reception was so warm--100 people showed up--that Mitchell now says he’s ready to hit the lecture circuit. In preparation, he has made motivational cassette tapes initially entitled “How to Succeed Without Efforting” ($15.95 a set), hired a public relations agent, scheduled another seminar in January, printed a brochure billing himself as a “consultant to management,” and set his in-town speaking fee at $1,500 for the first three hours.

Mitchell says he hopes to peddle his philosophy principally to managers trying to get the most out of their sales staffs, but he’s willing to help anyone. He says he has begun to give free lectures to juvenile delinquents and is counseling several people, including an alcoholic waitress with an IQ of 170.

What he offers is a mix of reconstituted Christianity, Eastern meditation, a form of social Darwinism, divine guidance, self-determinism and an I-Think-Therefore-I’m-Rich psychology, not unlike the gospel of prosperity that is popular among the upwardly mobile set.

In Mitchell’s view, there are no accidents:

The bum on Skid Row is wallowing in filth because, deep down, he wants to. Horrible diseases such as cancer are self-punishment. If a speeding sports car squashes you like a bug as you are walking across Broadway, then you were asking for it.

“Subconsciously, your program was something negative that attracted that accident,” he says.

International atrocities are a little stickier to explain, but their origins follow the same pattern. There is the case of genocide during World War II.

“Perhaps the collective consciousness came from Adolf Hitler saying they were bad people, to the point where maybe they wanted to punish themselves,” Mitchell said. Then he lowers his voice, “You know, this is getting touchy here. You can get a lot of Jews mad at you for saying that.”

Election Loss No Accident

It was also no accident, then, when Mitchell’s political career bottomed out, although he seemed like a pretty sure bet at the time to win reelection to his third term on the City Council.

Since he was first elected to the council in 1977, Mitchell has become known as one of San Diego’s more colorful characters. Sometimes he would show up at public functions in a Scottish kilt and his rambling discussions during public meetings often made it obvious that he was not paying attention. But his “Mitchellisms” are what became legendary around City Hall.

There was the time he suggested that the Fire Department save time and money by not chasing false alarms--a statement he vehemently denies--and the classic story about his complaints regarding the 911 emergency telephone system. Mitchell asked: How was anybody expected to find the 11 on the telephone dial?

He ran for mayor in 1983 and lost. During the campaign, Mitchell said he had the utmost confidence of his victory because he carried a mental image of himself sitting in the mayor’s office. He garnered less than 5% of the vote and didn’t make it past the primary.

Yet his position as the 1st District’s representative appeared secure. His constituents seemed forgiving of his unconventional behavior, and he made a mark by pushing community crime watch groups, encouraging the establishment of a mounted police patrol, and striking a pose as one of the council’s slow-growth advocates.

All that stopped in 1985. According to Mitchell, it wasn’t the hardball campaign by Wolfsheimer that unseated him, although he is still openly bitter about what he says are the lies his challenger told about his attendance record and votes on development projects.

No, it was Mitchell’s own subconscious that unseated him. Secretly he was searching for a way to make enough money to send his daughter, now a 17-year-old model, to an expensive college. It just couldn’t be done on a councilman’s salary, which was $35,000 a year at the time.

“It (my subconscious mind) found me a person who runs against me to get me out of office because I didn’t have the fortitude to get out myself,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell, a Republican, then turned his attention to Congress, hoping to oust Bates. Taking a tack from previous campaigns, Mitchell sweated more than 500 miles as he walked door to door to drum up support. He was crushed in the election almost 2-1.

Got Into Channeling

On the surface, Mitchell chalked up the loss to experience and tried to move on by selling real estate. But deep down, he felt disgraced--and he didn’t find that out until he became worried about his sudden weight gain and took to channeling to find out why.

Mitchell describes channeling as the process of talking to the “mind within the mind within the mind” that every person has. Mitchell said he has identified several different minds within himself, but he wouldn’t talk about them on the record.

“I’ll talk about it in this sense, I think the scientific explanation of channeling is you are talking to your Higher Self,” he said.

Anyway, Mitchell asked one of these minds why he was gaining so much weight. The answer--an ignominious anomaly--made him realize that he was punishing himself for a secret shame.

“What it came from was having lost the congressional election,” he said. “I didn’t think I had a dishonor or disgrace. I thought, ‘Well, so I lost that election, the door is closed on that and I’ll go on to something else.’

“That was true in my conscious mind, but my subconscious still retained a bit of dishonor or disgrace. So as soon as I erased it, I dumped 17 pounds.”

Getting Through

Channeling also came to Mitchell’s aid this spring when he was trying to contact an official in the White House about a possible appointment to a national drug policy board. Mitchell was nominated, but he could never get a telephone call through to the man who was responsible for making the final choice.

“In my meditative state, the Higher Self said, ‘Get in touch with his secretary, she likes to help people,’ ” Mitchell remarked.

He did, and, amazingly, the secretary arranged for Mitchell to meet with her boss on April 8 for an interview. But it was the last time he ever heard about the job.

“I don’t know what became of it,” he said. “I think someone with more political pull got it, probably.”

Mitchell reasoned that if erasing these mental blocks, called “inhibitors,” worked so well with his weight problem, the technique would be a cinch to help people succeed, especially those who were working hard but getting nowhere. That’s when he decided to become a motivational speaker and help people identify and erase negative inhibitors, such as fear, guilt, jealousy, anxiety, confusion, self-pity, hatred and “poverty-consciousness.”

“What you want to do is create an empty container in your subconscious mind, or your right brain, and the empty containers get to be filled,” he said. “And if you line your container with positiveness, then only positive things happen in your life.”

For example, a jealous person often feels like he is missing out, Mitchell said. That inhibitor must be erased and replaced with the truth that “in the universe, there’s plenty.”

“If somebody’s after my wife and I’m afraid I’m going to lose her, well, there’s an unlimited supply of wives, too. If that one doesn’t want you any more, there’s another one. You’ve just got to be relaxed and know there’s plenty and there’s unlimited dimensions,” said Mitchell, who is twice divorced.

“The ancients said it: ‘Be ye renewed by the changing of your mind.’ So pull out the old cassette and put in a new one and the scriptures say, ‘Behold, all things become new.’ All the outer world reactions to you are different now.”

If things don’t change right away, act like they have and they will, said Mitchell, who added that he subscribes to the theory that you should “fake it until you make it.”

A Success Story

One of Mitchell’s favorite success stories of overcoming an inhibitor is about two black men he knows who came from impoverished families.

“These two guys said they were on the Selma, Ala., (civil rights) march and they said, ‘What are we doing here?’ and the two of them said, ‘Let’s go out and get rich!’ ” The men now own companies in the San Diego area, he said.

Then there is the woman whom Mitchell is counseling to get over her fear of money. The woman married an abusive husband because, deep down, she believed that she was a spoiled little rich girl who should be punished, Mitchell said.

“What you are is a deserving rich girl,” Mitchell said he tells her. “By you getting more wealth, you are a demonstration to others that they can get it too and you can help those poor people, then.”

Such unbridled materialism doesn’t bother Mitchell, who explains that it is how giving you are that will determine how much you get.

“What it amounts to is the universe is wealth. God is wealth. He has everything in the universe. Everything in the universe is God, right? Some people even use the term that it is sinful to be rich. No. Because, is God sinful? God is rich . . . God has everything He wants, so is He sinful? No way!”

Whether Mitchell will be able to cash in as a motivational speaker is still to be seen, and he’s still selling real estate. In an ironic twist, Mitchell, an environmentalist who was adamantly opposed to the development of North City West, said he was trying to sell 30 acres of land in that neighborhood to a Houston builder when the city’s new Interim Development Ordinance ruined the deal this summer. He lost $84,000 in commissions.

But he says he’s enthusiastic and ready to pump up a generation of people with his new calling. And the affable, gray-haired former councilman says he can deflect any negative thoughts by others that his techniques for success should be discounted because he has lost recent elections.

“I’m not a failure,” Mitchell said. “I’m successful. I’m a happy person. I don’t carry any negative inhibitors that I know of. I may have one slip in there now and then, but I get rid of it.”